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"My name is Sam Bicke, and I consider myself a grain of sand."
It is 1974, and Sam is an ordinary man preparing himself for
history, making tapes to explain his plan to hijack a plane and
assassinate the president. We know, of course, that the event did
not happen, but the film, directed and co-written by Niels Mueller,
is based on a true story.

A flashback takes us back a year: Sam has begun a new job in an
office furniture business under the tutelage of expansive yet
clinical master salesman Jack Jones (the highly effective Jack
Thompson). Jack gives Sam training material - the motivational
books of Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie - and tapes on
sales techniques that use the same mantras.

Gradually, Sam's portrait is drawn. We see him visiting his
estranged wife, Marie (Naomi Watts) and their children, paying a
visit to his brother's business when he knows he is out and
dropping in on an old friend (Don Cheadle) with whom he dreams of
starting up a business. It becomes clear that Sam has unrealistic
expectations and strong feelings about his sense of rights and
dignity.

And wherever Sam looks, there is an emblematic figure on TV:
Richard Nixon, exhorting, promising, defending himself,
demonstrating family values and often sounding like a voice from
those motivational tapes. Jack describes Nixon to Sam as one of the
great salesmen, elected twice on the same promise: what could be a
more impressive demonstration of the American art of success?

Sam, deftly portrayed by Penn with the tics of desperation, has
already begun to unravel in front of us. His grievances build, his
sense of anger grows, his paranoia is heightened by a series of
rejections and disappointments as people around him lose patience
with his neediness and inflexibility. Mueller, neither judging nor
defending, but observing him at painfully close quarters, has
constructed around Penn's strong, almost excessive performance, a
striking series of images of the culture that Sam sees around him,
a world that seems to mock his losses, to elevate and reward all
the things he abhors, a world Nixon appears to embody.

How Sam chooses to demonstrate his power over the culture - a
power that is his, the motivational tapes tell him, if he believes
it is - has some startling contemporary resonances. There is space
left for the viewer to speculate on the implications of these
resonances, in a film that relentlessly portrays a man adrift from
the American Dream.